These are the top stories this afternoon, 4:00 p.m. on Feb 27th:

Just four months before Mexico’s presidential election, front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is keeping all options open regarding the country’s energy opening as a unified message on the topic continues to elude his top advisers.

Since 2012, Santos’ government had been negotiating with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), an armed group that fought the Colombian state for over 50 years. In August 2016, negotiators announced a final agreement to end the conflict that had left 220,000 people dead and displaced millions. Last year, the rebel group relaunched as a political party, changing their logo of rifles for a red rose

CARACAS (REUTERS) – Dancing in front of red-shirted supporters, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro formally signed up on Tuesday to run for re-election in an April vote opponents say is a farce that will consolidate his dictatorship.

Just 10 days after Brazilian President Michel Temer signed a decree handing the military control of public security in Rio de Janeiro, notifications like these continue to fill the screens of smartphones across the surrounding state, informing those who have downloaded the Crossfire app (Fogo Cruzado in Portuguese) of when and where shootouts and gunshots are heard. Most live in Rio’s innumerable favelas, where police—and now military—operations have become an everyday occurrence.

PANAMA CITY — Panamanian police on Tuesday handcuffed a security guard working for President Trump’s hotel here, in the midst of a dispute in which the hotel’s majority owner has tried to fire the Trump Organization — and Trump employees have refused to leave.

These are the top stories this morining, 4:00 a.m. on Feb 27th:

The Texans, whose names were not released, traveled to Nuevo Leon on Feb. 17. They lost contact with their families in the U.S. the next day. On Feb. 19, their relatives started getting ransom demands, the Nuevo Leon prosecutors office said in a written statement.

Brazil’s top prosecutor on Monday requested the Supreme Court issue an order to prevent the head of the federal police from interfering in a criminal investigation that could result in new corruption charges against President Michel Temer.

Two presumed stowaways died Monday in Ecuador after they fell from the landing gear of a New York-bound plane. The airport in the coastal city of Guayaquil had to close for 90 minutes while the two bodies were removed from the runway.

Relatives of the 44 crew members of a lost Argentine submarine have begun raising funds to search for it privately. The navy called off its rescue mission for the ARA San Juan in December, two weeks after it went missing.

What has surprised Mexicans is not that President Trump “lost his temper” in a telephone conversation with his Mexican counterpart, prompting President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel a trip to Washington, but that Peña Nieto was even thinking about going in the first place.